


fate holds her firm in its cradle

by scioscribe



Category: Us (Movie 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Horror, Life Among the Tethered
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 18:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25580176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Two Adelaides grow up in the tunnels.
Relationships: Adelaide Wilson/Red (Us Movie 2019)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 51
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	fate holds her firm in its cradle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PositivelyVexed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PositivelyVexed/gifts).



> Title from "Margaret vs. Pauline," by Neko Case.

It’s hard to tell time down here. There isn’t any sun, and the batteries in the clocks are all dead. Sometimes she puts one of the big round schoolroom clocks in her lap and pries the bubble cover off it; she moves the hands around, clicking her tongue. _Tock, tock, tock._

The other one comes and sits across from her, her legs crossed too, an overturned plate on her lap, rabbit and cold instant mashed potatoes smeared across her knees. She moves her hand too, one fingertip circling around and around on the yellowed plastic plate.

“Tock.” It comes out of her throat like a frog’s ribbit.

One of them can’t talk right because she never learned how.

One of them can’t talk right because the other one crushed her windpipe.

At the moment, the Adelaide with the clock in her lap can’t remember which one she is.

They’re always close now, and the boundaries between them are fluid. Their foreheads, still baby-smooth, touch when they sleep; their memories are turning into a chain of cut-out paper dolls linked at the hand.

But one of them has a real clock and the other only has a plate and she, _she_ is the one who has the clock, _she_ is one and the other is two, so she is Adelaide.

The other one looks at her with unsmiling dark eyes, knowing what she’s thinking.

“Tomorrow,” the other one says in her—their—raspy and broken voice. “Me.” She runs her finger in rapid, frantic circles around the edge of the plate. “Tock, tock, tock. Now it’s tomorrow. I’m Adelaide.”

“Adelaide,” Adelaide agrees, because the other one has sharper teeth and longer fingernails. Besides, she doesn’t want to be Adelaide anymore anyway. Adelaides get choked and dragged down into the dark; Adelaides wake up caught in cages. Being strong matters more than being real.

She picks something strong instead. _Red_ —a stoplight, danger, fire. _Red_ —the color of an EXIT sign.

* * *

They used to have parents, but now they don’t anymore. The upstairs parents lost their Adelaide, so none of the parents can find them, even when they’re right there, tugging on their downstairs-parents’ sleeves. They have no one to give them a soft rabbit-skin, a clean T-shirt, a hair bobble.

But there are ways around that, as long as you are two.

“I’ll show you,” Adelaide says. She moves more suddenly than Red can, like she’s being dragged along by an invisible wire. She glides down the length of the hall until she finds a little Tethered girl whose mother is braiding her hair.

Adelaide gives Red a sharp look and then shoves the girl, knocking her out-of-place. “Keep her away,” Adelaide says as she settles down at the mother’s feet and has her hair pinched between the twisting and winding fingers. The mother either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that this wasn’t the girl whose head she was cradling in her hands just a second before.

The little girl looks big-eyed and lost. She tries to return to her mother, but Red blocks her. She has to complete Adelaide’s circuit, she understands vaguely. That’s the rule; that's how they work. She exists so Adelaide can do what Adelaide wants.

So she takes the little girl by the shoulders. “No,” she says, but the girl doesn’t know any words, and unlike Adelaide, she can’t pick them off the surface of Red’s mind. She just starts to cry, her face crumpling up like a ball of paper, and she tugs at her half-braided hair, groping after the feeling she’s supposed to be having. Red keeps having to hold her back. “No, no, no.” Finally, she sees the girl understand. Her hands still and fall to her sides. Her tears dry up.

She’s listening to Red, not to whoever’s upstairs.

Maybe that means Red is getting stronger. _Redder_.

Adelaide rejoins them, her hair neat. “See?”

The girl runs back to her mother, dancing along her predetermined steps. Red’s interest in her fades. No one else means much to her when Adelaide is close like this. Adelaide fills her mind: an obsession who makes her face hot and her mouth dry.

“I see,” Red says, and they smile at each other.

They don’t always see the same things.

Adelaide’s voice is raspy because Red’s throat has never healed; Red is the only person Adelaide’s ever talked to, so Adelaide thinks people are just supposed to sound like that. Red knows better. Red burns with all the truths she knows.

They’re like a fairy tale, and these are the gifts they’ve gotten. Adelaide wanted to be real, so she is, so Red follows her and does what she does.

Red wanted to be strong, so she’s the one with secrets. She’s the one with plans.

* * *

Red used to wonder why Adelaide didn’t shove _her_.

She could have. Red’s parents, like the Tethered mother, wouldn’t have known the difference: all they needed was a Red-sized girl. _An_ Adelaide, not the _original_ Adelaide.

They would have just gone on braiding her hair, helping her with her homework, telling her she wasn’t old enough for scary movies.

But Adelaide wanted a family. A real family to make her real.

Real families know when you’re missing. They know who you are, and they wouldn’t get you confused with someone else.

So Red is Adelaide’s only family, and Adelaide is Red’s. Now that they can tell what few differences there are between them. Now that they sometimes have different dreams.

 _I’m the only one who can know that you’re not me_ , Red thinks. _And I’m not you._

But if she’s not Adelaide, she’s still Adelaide’s echo, shaped by her, trailing off afterwards. Echoes lose strength as they keep going, and that’s not what Red wants. She’s not going to give away the power of her name just so Adelaide can hold onto hers forever.

Among all the plans in her head, now, among all the bright Red thoughts she has that Adelaide does not, she needs to create some order. She needs to know what to do—needs to know how to use their twoness to make herself one.

* * *

Red should be taller than Adelaide. She’s the one who had at least a few years of food pyramid-balanced hot lunches, of after-school apples, of shredded wheat cereal and milk that she was always told builds strong bones.

But they’re the same height. They’ve stood back to back, their skinny bodies touching, and they’ve felt the crowns of their heads in exactly the same spot.

Whatever Red did in the above-ground, however she grew, she dragged Adelaide along with her, like Adelaide’s body, before Red came, was Play-Doh, was Silly Putty thrown against Red and stamped with her image. But now there is no above-ground one of their two, so they only have the bodies they grow into down here in the dark. It’s been years now, and they haven’t changed as much as they should have.

And there’s only so much they can take from the other Tethered. Red doesn’t like stealing from them.

 _I’m one of you,_ she always wants to say to them as they flock around her like squawking, flightless birds. _She’s not my two, you’re my many. I’m Tethered to her at heart. I’m not the real one anymore. I’m one of you._

It’s true. She’s always been one of the Tethered. What does it mean to be Tethered, after all? It means you don’t make your own choices. It means you have people and things forced on you, that you’re always doing things you don’t want to do with people you don’t know or like.

Red didn’t choose her parents, brittle and chilly and always wrenching away from each other, her parents who didn’t find her, didn’t save her. Red didn’t choose Adelaide, but she has to be the other half of her anyway. She has to be shaped by her, the way an apple is shaped by the teeth that bite it.

Now Adelaide is dragging them both down into a hell the other Tethered can’t know, because they have their upstairs people to pull their bodies like taffy. Red finds medical textbooks—downstairs, there are no picture books or chapter books, but there are lots of textbooks, all of them printed on pages that crinkle as she turns them, all of them in small-tight black text on white, like the Bible. (There aren’t any Bibles either.) Red reads: _scurvy, rickets, malnutrition._

“We have to go up,” she whispers to Adelaide that night, the two of them lying close as always, close like twins waiting to be born. “We have to go home.”

“We’re two. They’ll want one.”

Red can imagine how they would do it. There’s no limit to the things Red can imagine. They would trade off wearing the starchy ordinary-girl-skin of The One and Only Adelaide, and if you didn’t go to school that day, you would hide in the closet, among the shoes and the spiders and dust. If you didn’t sleep in the bed, you would sleep underneath it, in the small dark space. They would be an American tradition: two for the price of one, a value girl.

But topside-people notice more—sometimes—than the downstairs ones. It wouldn’t work.

Only one of them can go, and everyone knows topside-people are more real than the Tethered. If Red went back, she would still be Red, but she would be Adelaide too, and Adelaide would become nothing: all the realness she's gathered up over the years would dry up. She would become nameless. An echo.

Red doesn’t want that for her. Adelaide is, after all, the one who taught her to be strong. Adelaide is the one who showed her that all the realness in the world can’t save you from hands around your neck and chains around your wrist.

Sometimes she wants to kill Adelaide, but she's never wanted to destroy her.

No, Red isn’t planning to go to the surface. Not now. But she needs—she senses this dimly—some kind of _purity_. Her purpose is clear, but her feelings about Adelaide are too muddled. She needs to be diamond-hard and clear as glass, or her strength won’t be enough to do everything she wants to do.

So instead of answering Adelaide, Red presses against her in the dark. She bumps her mouth against Adelaide’s: coppery taste, chapped lips.

“Then we won’t go,” Red says against Adelaide’s mouth. “We are two. I won’t leave you and you won’t leave me.”

“No,” Adelaide says, a little breathlessly, and she wriggles against Red, pushing their bodies together. She’s the more eager one—Red wants too, but even more than that, doing what Adelaide does is her function—but she’s the one who stops first, who pulls back before too much can happen. There's a pulse of guilt beating in her veins that she's forgotten Red can feel.

And that’s when Red knows she’s won, whatever Adelaide thinks. She drifts off to sleep in Adelaide’s arms, and there’s a smile on her face when she wakes up with handcuffs around her wrists again, chaining her to the metal bedstead.

Clarity is the sound of metal rattling against metal. _Betrayal_.

If what she feels still isn’t hate, it’s at least satisfaction. That gives her power. That makes her stronger.

Even now, she’s lying still while Adelaide is in motion, and she feels nothing but a fluttering in her stomach: it's pleasant, like the arousal. (And maybe it is the arousal, still.) Anticipation, not distress. She’s Echo turning back into a girl while her Narcissus goes on thinking she’s so real, so beautiful, that there must really be two of her, that the face she’s looking at doesn’t just cover deep dark water that would drown you with a kiss.

This suffering is what she needed to purify her, and it makes no difference to her pain that she's the one who engineered it, that her abandonment was inevitable. She knew Adelaide would choose the real world over her, no matter what she promised. She knew Adelaide would lie to her. It’s the way of the world. Everyone leaves home eventually.

Someday, Red will too.

.


End file.
